Evelyn’s stomach knotted and turned over, making her groan. She was ill, too upset about that detective to be able to do her shift tonight. She couldn’t stop worrying that he’d come back; she had no alibi for the night of Wendy’s fall, and she knew her fingerprints must be all over Wendy’s house. She called in sick to the convenience store, speaking in a raspy voice and faking a few coughs. She hoped her boss would believe she had the flu. She couldn’t afford to lose her job, no matter what happened.
She’d been lucky to find this job right after she graduated from St. Bernadette’s. As a graduation present, her father had offered to help with university tuition. But Evelyn had had enough of school. She didn’t think she could concentrate on studies, anyway, with Mark keeping her up at night the way he did. She wished she had never called him back. He would stand outside her window, waving his wand or performing, in elaborate pantomime, the tying of knots, the palming of coins. It seemed he never tired of upbraiding her for losing the magic kit. No, she couldn’t possibly muster the solitary discipline that studying required. She needed distraction. And the convenience store provided plenty of that.
The convenience store, in fact, was nothing but an endless series of distractions, urgent, trivial tasks that interrupted each other in an unbroken chain from morning to night, so that nobody who worked there could ever string together two coherent thoughts. Evelyn liked it that way. She also liked the anonymity of the place. There was a pleasant illusion of intimacy in the store, never authentic enough to be mistaken for true intimacy, and far more comforting than the real thing. Customers told her the most surprising details of their private lives, then took their newspapers or milk or coffee and simply left. Nobody asked her much about herself. She lost touch with Jo and Betty and the other girls from St. Bernadette’s, most of whom went on to university. She rented a small apartment near the store and settled into a small, circumscribed life in which there was little hope and therefore little disappointment.
Among the regulars, Evelyn had a few favourites. There was the elderly widow who shoplifted tins of cat food, while Evelyn made sure to look the other way, and the firefighters from the fire hall down the street who called her “Sweetheart” and complained about their wives. Her favourite customer of all was a young man with golden skin and a glass eye, who was forever leaving behind his sunglasses or his cigarettes or his keys. Evelyn would place these objects into the lost and found box, a little off to the side, apart from the ordinary jumble of lost things, because they were special. And because she knew he would be coming back. She recognized it as a form of flirting, this constant pretense at forgetting. A way of seeing her again and again. A way of making her think of him when he was not there.
Evelyn felt a warm rush of regret, almost pleasurable, as she remembered the afternoon Alika left his wallet on the counter and changed her life forever. A wallet was a necessary item, and Evelyn expected him back any minute, but he didn’t come. She opened it up and found his identification, his address — he lived in a house close by — and his telephone number. So she called him. But first, she turned the wallet inside out, perused his business cards, driver’s license, gym membership, his receipts from the drycleaner and the hardware store.
“Thanks,” he said, as soon as he arrived. “I didn’t even notice it was missing.”
Evelyn handed the wallet back to him, and he put it in his pocket without looking inside. That meant he trusted her.
“You’re very kind,” he said.
Evelyn tried not to show her surprise. She tried to act as if people said such things to her all the time.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very — you’re beautiful.” She blushed. What had possessed her to say such a thing?
Alika was looking at her intently. He was seeing her.
“When do you get off?” he asked.
“Not until eleven.”
He smiled. “Should I come back at eleven?”
“Yes,” she said.
For the rest of her shift, she flew through her chores, dusting and ringing up purchases and counting out change with a grin. He had noticed her. He had really seen her.
Alika didn’t know how to cook. He was aware that cabbages and lettuce and basil and tomatoes grew in the backyard. He had, occasionally, purchased lemons, salt, and other necessities from the supermarket. But how these ingredients came together to create his meals, his home, his daily, unnoticed comforts, was a mystery to him. I watched him sadly as he ripped a piece of bread from a stale loaf, then looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was for.
Now that I was gone, the house was reverting to the chaos of its bachelor state. The drain in the kitchen sink was full of tiny objects — grains of rice, twist ties, noodles, the little leaves from the Brussels sprouts. Everything that resided under the furniture — socks and books and bits of string and unpaid bills — was accumulating a thin veneer of greasy dust. And there was nothing I could do about it.
I lingered by Alika’s side, longing to touch his beautiful black hair, his dark eyebrows, to trace the contours of his damaged ear. He closed his eyes, began to snore. I watched his temples, his smooth, high forehead. What on earth went on in there? I pictured the interior of my husband’s mind as a dimly lit space, crowded with tangled bits of string, dusty old noodles and leftover Brussels sprouts, their tiny leaves unravelling, seeking the light.
Seated at Alice’s desk, Felix moved his finger slowly down the pages as he read.
This wasn’t him. This fearless, swift-thinking hero. He read about a decisive, risk-taking Felix, a Felix who squared his jaw and looked danger in the face, barely wincing when the bullet came searing through his chest.
Felix knew he’d screamed when the bullet hit him. Just like a girl. And he’d cried in the emergency ward, while a beautiful young doctor worked feverishly to staunch the wound, and a nurse held onto his hand. He’d wept, remembering he hadn’t taken Poppy for a walk that morning, that he’d neglected to feed her, that his morning had been erased, and there was no way he was ever going to recover it.
As he read further, Felix noticed that Alice couldn’t seem to keep the story on track. She kept going off on tangents, or adding details that had nothing to do with the murder case. In the third chapter, in the middle of a scene about Felix’s physiotherapy, she began to describe the time he’d swum out into the middle of Falcon Lake to help a drowning boy — an event that occurred when Felix wasn’t even on duty. It had happened long before the double murder, long before he'd even met Alice. It had merited only two inches of newsprint at the time, but Alice, an assiduous researcher, had found them. She had gleaned the bare facts of the incident and embroidered them wildly.
Felix remembered the occasion very well. He was on vacation and it was his birthday. Early in the evening, as the sun was sinking in an overcast sky, he’d been waiting for his friends to arrive to take him into town for a birthday dinner. He’d been hungry and a little impatient, barely paying attention to the crowd of boisterous, splashing teenagers cannonballing from the off-shore diving dock. But he happened to be watching, idly, as one of them attempted a one-and-a-half off the three-metre board. Felix saw the boy go up and up and then tuck his head into his chest, and he knew something was off. A miscalculation had been made. Felix started running even before he saw the diver’s head graze the edge of the board as he came down. He was in the water before the other kids yelled for help. When Felix saw the boy in danger, Alice wrote, his first thought had been to save a life. But that wasn’t true. Felix’s first thought had been that the water was cold, that he didn’t want to get wet, that he’d just dressed for dinner. He dived off the boat dock and swam about a hundred yards and then began to surface-dive, while the boy’s parents paddled frantically in their canoe toward the spot where their son had vanished. Alice spent two long paragraphs describing that hundred-yard swim, putting all sorts of thoughts into Felix’s head, about not giving up, about the value of the boy’s life. The only thought Felix
remembered having spared for the kid was “you idiot!” He had dived and dived again until he caught the boy by the hair and dragged him to the surface. It was an ugly business. The kid had vomited, and so had Felix. The mother had been hysterical. Felix’s birthday plans were ruined. But Alice made it sound like a miracle.
Felix read again the description of his own heroism. He wanted to be fearless and swift-thinking. But he knew he wasn’t. No. Alice had dreamed this story. She had made it all up, out of some deep, Irish corner of her imagination. He ran his finger lightly across the description of this other Felix, this distorted reflection. Who was this man his wife had created? Whoever he was, it was clear that Alice was falling in love with him.
Evelyn curled up on the couch with a hot water bottle and a quilt, just as if she really were sick, and thought about Alika. Her first date with him had been her first date ever. He picked her up at the store at eleven o’clock, just as he’d promised, and took her to an all-night doughnut shop nearby. Evelyn was too excited to eat her walnut cruller, even though Alika had bought it for her. She just sipped her soda and asked him questions about his family and his childhood in Hawaii.
“Why did you move to Canada?” she asked.
“My mother grew up here, in Winnipeg. She met my dad in Hawaii when she took a vacation there. So then, when she left him…” He shrugged.
So, he was a child of a broken home, too. They had something in common. A bond.
“Have you ever been to Golden?” she asked. She tried to tell him how the light hit the mountains there, but she couldn’t get the words right. She sounded dumb, and Alika was growing distracted, bored with her.
Evelyn felt that old, panicky flutter in her chest, that feeling that she might crack in two. She had to get his attention, make him see her again. So she told him the story of her brother, Mark, and he listened. He was sympathetic, placing one of his large, warm hands over hers, sending a tingle through the veins of her arm into her heart. But afterwards he never called her. He didn’t come back to the store for a whole week.
Evelyn knew the name of his gym from the membership card in his wallet, and she strolled up and down the sidewalk in front of it, trying to look casual, stopping for coffee in the restaurant across the road, watching the gym door through the window. When Alika came out, she ran right into him. What a surprise, he said. Of course they just had to go for coffee.
As she sat across from him in the restaurant, trying to force another coffee into her stomach, Evelyn realized Alika wasn’t interested in what she was saying. When he said goodbye so easily it almost broke her heart, he made no promise to call. But she remembered where he worked, where he shopped, his home address. He had invited her to all these places by leaving his wallet on her counter.
Evelyn got up from the couch and retrieved her phone from the kitchen. Then she snuggled back under her quilt and dialled Alika’s number. She’d been calling him several times a day, since she learned that Wendy was in the hospital, but she was never able to reach him. Tonight it was the same. Wendy’s voice on the answering machine. Evelyn hung up. She laid the phone on her belly and closed her eyes, losing herself again in the memory of the happiest days of her life.
One evening, a year ago last spring, Alika and Evelyn ran into each other for the sixth time. Or was it the fifth? Evelyn counted. No. It was the sixth time, and Alika had taken her to a lounge for drinks. And that night he’d taken her home. To his house. She never wanted to leave.
All last June and July, she went to his house every Friday night and spent the weekend, working at making him fall in love with her, at making his house her home. She left her toothbrush, a comb, articles of clothing. She was only waiting for the word from Alika and she’d give up her apartment. She bought a new mat for his bathroom floor and stocked his shelves with her own favourite brand of shampoo. She dug up his garden, even planted those doomed roses.
The roses were cursed. It was because of the roses that Alika met Wendy.
Sure, everyone was thinking about me, but no one believed in me anymore. It was unfair.
Evelyn could sense my presence, and I made sure to haunt her as often as I could. It was lonely, though. It seemed unfair that the only person who believed in me was my own murderer. I mean, something had happened to me, at last. Something momentous. All my life I’d been of little consequence, a nobody, a person whose very birth was accidental, a person shifted from family to family at the merest whim of circumstance. And here I was, outrageously wronged, at the very centre of a tragic drama, and nobody even knew about it.
I tried to tell Felix about it, to convince him to give up on questioning Alika, that Alika didn’t know anything, and that he should question Evelyn again. But he couldn’t hear me. I don’t think he believed in the afterlife. He didn’t seem to have any religion at all except for the bibliomancy he practised. Every morning he tossed coins on a table top and consulted the I Ching, though he didn’t seem to find any answers in there about my murder. But I could tell he wasn’t giving up. He spent a lot of time in his office leafing through the file that held the unfinished story of my death. He’d sigh and rub his head with his hands. He had that look people get when they know there’s something they’ve missed, something that’s nagging at them. So I tried to be patient. I was sure he’d figure it out soon, provide some sense of closure to this thing, and Evelyn would be punished. Then I’d finally be able to — well, I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to do.
Louise had lost two thousand dollars in the past week, even though she’d played every day. The household account was dangerously low, especially since the mayor had bought himself a handsome new tailor-made pin-striped suit with wide lapels that made him look like a Hollywood gangster.
She needed Bradley Byrnes, but she hadn’t been able to reach him for days. So today, though she’d just come from a late afternoon tea at the Chamber of Commerce, and wasn’t disguised in the least, she’d taken a chance and come up to his consulting firm.
She waited in the lobby of his building until his receptionist left for the day, and then she took the elevator to the nineteenth floor. He was furious when she walked into his inner office.
“What are you doing here?” He locked the door behind her.
“Why don’t you return my calls?”
“I’ve been busy.” Now that the door was locked, he relaxed a bit. He pecked her on the cheek, caressed her hips. “I was going to call you tomorrow.”
“Uh huh,” said Louise. “Well, I can’t wait until tomorrow. I’m in — I’m a little short this month.”
“I can fix that,” he said. He smiled as he drew his cheque book from his pocket and began to write. “But you remember what we talked about? Last week? I haven’t seen any action on that front.”
“I know. I talked to him.”
“Well, he hasn’t done anything. The injunction’s still standing. Every day that goes by is money down the drain. And our investors are getting nervous. If they start pulling out — ”
“I know, I know.” Louise reached for the cheque, but Byrnes held it up above her head. With his other hand, he drew an envelope from his inside pocket.
“It’s a simple matter to fix,” he said. “A few words in the right places. Give this to your husband, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”
Louise took the cheque and the envelope and stuffed them in her straw purse. Nothing to worry about? What the hell did he mean? She placed her hand on the doorknob, planning to flounce out without so much as a kiss goodbye.
But Byrnes grabbed her, hard, by the wrist.
“Not that way,” he said. “Take the freight elevator and leave through the loading zone at the back. For God’s sake, if anyone sees us together now we’re screwed.”
As she minced down the alley in her new silk sandals, dodging broken glass and garbage, Louise was fuming. She’d thought she was finished with this damned casino business. She’d thought it was over and done with and Byrnes was in her debt for good. Bu
t now he wanted more.
Back at home, she locked herself in her bedroom and opened the envelope. Newspaper clippings. Louise read the first article, something about a trial ten years ago, a trial presided over by the same judge who was in charge of the injunction against demolishing the Walker Theatre. He had given a suspended sentence to a stockbroker accused of embezzling. There were nine articles altogether, spanning twelve years, and in each one the same judge had let somebody off for something.
She hoped Bradley Byrnes knew what he was doing.
The garden was overgrown and past all hope now, Noni thought. Only Wendy knew the peculiarities of each plant, each one’s special needs. Noni wasn’t even sure she knew the difference between a dillweed and a carrot top. It was the first of September, and soon the plants would go to seed, ruining the garden, wasting it. Then Noni would have to phone someone from the yellow pages to come and dig the garden under, but she didn’t want to think about that. That was too final. She dipped her spoon into her bowl and tried to eat some of Rosa’s pea soup. Maybe she could tempt Alika, who was sitting in front of his own soup, watching it grow cold. But her throat wouldn’t open.
Soon it would be time to drive to the hospital again, where they conducted a vigil that filled Noni with dread. Because Wendy wasn’t at the hospital. Wendy was lost, and Noni didn’t want to look at the body she’d left behind. It lay there, apparently complete, content to rest in its bed almost casually, as though nothing were wrong. Alika spent hours looking at it, and Rosa often talked to it, but Noni hated it. Noni wanted Wendy back, and she often had to leave the building to cry in the parking lot.
In the First Early Days of My Death Page 8
